"I don’t know what concept it was. Whatever the concept was that came out of his addled mind, to me, he’s just got a cob-on with someone and she’s probably shagging around, and obviously he’s set it in Berlin, where he’d probably never have been, and just gets stuck into the misery of it. I remember in an interview with Nick Kent in the NME Lou slagged it off and then changed his mind and said it was absolutely brilliant. At the time everything I played was always in the dark – and I’d tell my mum not to come out of the living room door, and I’d be upstairs and I could sense the light coming from downstairs and it would spoil my vibe. Playing that was just, “woah.” ‘Caroline Says II’, is like, “jeez…” - turning the tables on old Caroline, in a nasty way. I just loved the production. The atmosphere was so dense and the concept is just that the songs ran into each other and this gave it a sense of order. What he was singing about made me think, “hang on, am I really being allowed into this?” It was a bit weird. It’s like a psychopath’s night in, and it got me. Whenever I play that, it’s got a very German, emotive feel. And any emotional German, it’s going to be heavy emotions, bad ones. They’re not renowned for their joie de vivre. Obviously Hitler had emotions, but fuckin’ hell… So it does capture that weird European coldness. It’s weird because you don’t know if Lou really cares, he’s not exactly Sinatra or Lanza, you don’t know if he’s taking the piss. He probably thinks halfway through a song, this isn’t any good, I better sing it weirdly. “She looked like Mary Queen of Scots seemed very regal to me, just shows how wrong you can be". Pure Lou Reed that was. I couldn’t do that because I don’t do sinister. That’s someone who has a different kind of relationship – it’s not just sad, it’s weird. Big favourite with Jimmy Savile at the time, I heard."

"This album is a big one for me. My friend Michael Diamond from the Beastie Boys introduced me to it. He visited me in Portland and I took him to this record store that was $1 per record and it was just bins and bins of records. He said, ""Oh my god, you should totally get this, it's a great record"", so I got it. In it, Isaac Hayes is leading an orchestra and he's also at the piano and he's talking in between songs telling funny stories. So it's almost a cabaret performance. I didn't know what that was when I got the record. Well, I kind of did, as my uncle was a drag queen. But it was the fact that he would tell stories that would lead into a song. I had done that in Bikini Kill but people were just like, ""Shut up and just sing your song!"" and I was like, ""No! What if I specifically made it a part of the show and had things I was going to talk about?"" His stories would turn from tragic to funny. It really validated what I was doing but he was doing it better. I thought, instead of trying not to do it so I don't get shit I should just do it better. Keep doing it and doing it even better and make it more part of the show instead of less. The other huge thing was, ""Why don't I get to work with an orchestra? Why don't I get to work with really talented people and be like, 'No, let's change it to the key of B' like, 'This key would be better for my voice' and have people who really know what they're doing?"" I'm in that band now – not an orchestra, but I'm working with musicians where I'm like, ""Hey, can we do this song for my sweet spot vocally?"" I'm not the leader in the way that Isaac Hayes was on that album. That record really made me question why I didn't think of myself as someone able to work with people who can talk about things being sharp or flat."

"I associate this album with a specific moment in my life. We never had a TV until I was about 16, so we would only hear about stuff like The Simpsons and Neighbours from friends. They seemed exotic and distant. But this one time I did see an episode of Neighbours in which one of the main characters got hit by a car, and it really fucked me up! I'd never seen anything like it before. And so, as I was driving home, my mum had Sgt. Pepper's on in the car and I was listening to 'A Day In The Life', and I was looking at a certain spot in the road, and I heard the line, which goes ""he blew his mind out in a car"", and it all suddenly came together. I imagined a car crash and I imagined this spot on the road and I imagined what I'd just seen with this song. And I think that is the first time that I genuinely understood the concept of death. I was probably only about five. That's the thing about The Beatles, you can get it into you from zero up. I never forgot that feeling of being petrified and understanding death for the first time. And the music did that to me. It wasn't Neighbours or the road, it was the fact that somehow that song had transported me and helped me to understand a real emotion. He [Lennon] had been dead about five years at that point. Children love The Beatles, and they love Queen, because there is something about those bands that is so colourful and fun and they create such a world. And the Sgt. Pepper's world is so easy to visualise, you can literally hear the crowd and the characters and the colours, the carnival air. It's all just magical. I've always enjoyed the fact that my band doesn't sound the same from song to song, and I think we get that from The Beatles. The Beatles were every type of band for ten years, and then they were nothing, which is probably why they are the most famous band in the world."